Anatomy of Landscape – Jos captures Oghobase’s trip to the Jos Plateau in Central Nigeria in pursuit of residual evidence of British colonial tin mining activities in the region. This investigation entailed surveying ‘mining ponds’ resembling pristine lakes, depleted landscapes, and rock formations. It ended up taking the artist deep ... More
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain developed Intervals III as part of a body of work in dialogue with the Dream Pool Essays, by Shen Kuo (1031-1095). In his well-known text, the Song Dynasty thinker made what is no doubt the earliest published observations on climate change when he noted traces of a ... More
Untitled (‘Ruins’ Series) is an ongoing series of paintings inspired by long walks around unexcavated archeological sites in and around Lahore. Collecting broken pieces of ceramics materials (shards) found on the ground, he reconstituted these fragments into sculptures seemingly excavated from long-buried cities. These sherds hint at the ancient craftsmanship ... More
River of Sweat is a vibrant 4 ft x 16 ft long tapestry stitched together from recycled sarees that would have ended up in the landfill. It is an ode to the social dimensions of ecologies, communities, and societies, shedding light on the harsh realities faced by craftspersons in an ... More
The Ascension is a 2018 performance in which the artist gilds an ice sculpture as it melts. The frozen statue is of the Buraq, a winged creature with the head of a woman and the body of a horse. While said to have been the mount of the Islamic Prophet ... More
KM-32, detailing the history of the artist’s mother’s decades-old food processor, lovingly pays homage to jugaad, a bricolage practice born of South Asian ingenuity and thrift that extends the life of everyday objects and stands in contrast to consumerist society's wasteful notions of obsolescence. The video highlights the skill of ... More
Feint Recollections of a Time Beyond is a digital render of a solitary Iraqi date palm tree, a national icon of Iraq, gently swaying in the waters of the Euphrates. After the ancient city Anah was flooded in 1987, many palm trees stood half-submerged, peering above the water line, a ... More
Caste Brick is a terracotta cube installation that speaks to the enduring legacy of brick-making in the subcontinent. Harking back to archeological findings of the Indus Valley civilization, the tradition of brickmaking is an indigenous knowledge system that has been passed on and solidified into mass production. In spending time ... More
Weaving footage from diverse hydrographies such as the Colorado, the Yaqui, the Xingu, the Spree, and the Magdalena Rivers, Carolina Caycedo’s To Stop Being a Threat and to Become a Promise (2017) contrasts the ancestral and rural 'campesino' lifestyle found throughout the Americas with extractivist approaches to water and land ... More
Chow and Lin’s Even If It Looks Like Grass opens up into co-existing systems of wheat and data centers, in a study that spans from the early human history 10,000 years till the present. It looks at global phenomena of agriculture and information technology structures that emerged and spread ... More
An extended fabric installation, Mesa Ritual Chola Body Story is based on the artist’s own medical experiences. Taking as its point of departure the medical gauze that was ever-present during the artist’s experience with chemotherapy, the artist employs a reticular weaving technique similar to the openwork of indigenous gauzes, which ... More
Daniel Otero Torres’s Speaking to the Ground is an installation of eight tall terracotta vessels, commissioned for the Lahore Biennale. It pays homage to the ancient irrigation system, known as ollas in the Americas and as matka on the Subcontinent. These unglazed clay pots, revered for their efficiency in irrigation, ... More
The project focuses on the Great Fergana Canal, a 270-km long canal between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that was built in 1939 to divert water from the Syr Darya river to the cotton fields. As cotton is known as the “white gold” of the region, the canal made it possible to ... More
Breathe is a series of public installations across the city of Lahore that engages the public and explores policy issues around the global health emergency of air pollution. Major Pakistani cities such as Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, and Peshawar face significant challenges with air pollution due to rapid urbanization and high ... More
In Memory Orbits, a project commissioned by LB03 and installed in the Barracks Museum in Nasir Bagh, Ehsan Ul Haq and Iqra Tanveer resonates to a sense of urgency, a moment in time that speculates a possible paradigm shift. The installation transitions between objects, ceramic sculptures, and light projections; it ... More
In The Sound of Silence (#2), Alavi engages with the histories of Australia’s cameleers, laborers whose lives were intertwined with those of the animals they were brought on to handle, and who immigrated from South and West Asia to help colonize the continent’s arid outback. Though they played a vital ... More
VASL is a collaboration between Alavi and Feroza Hakeem and Raheem Jaan, two Quetta-based Hazara artists. This collage series juxtaposes photographs of landscapes across Pakistan and Afghanistan with the Australian outback. As the curves of the mountains, rivers and landscapes of Pakistan and Afghanistan merge with those of the Australian ... More
Thandi Sarrak eik kahani is an art work that reimagines city square—typically defined by hard surfaces and human activity—as dynamic, living spaces that breathe life into the heart of our urban environments. It envisions an opportunity to weave together the past, present, and future through the intentional selection and cultivation ... More
How to Become a Rock is a project that pays attention to and turns towards the earth body and its tectonic formations. Emerging from an ongoing research and engagement within the Karakoram mountains, I began working on this chapter last year during a residency in Paris at the Cité des ... More
Khorshid Fruit translates to mixed fruit in Persian, and represents the diverse crowd Hakeem has encountered after moving to Lahore, which makes her feel safe as a minority. In the painting, the artist created trees by collaging newspaper-cut texts with words like “hospitals”, “unsafe”, “Hazara”, “targeted”, “Quetta”, “Afghanistan” and “poor” ... More
Return to Water is a series of paintings on Gharial crocodiles, a critically endangered species from South Asia preserved as specimens in the collection of the Yale Peabody Museum, where the artist lived and studied. This work addresses the objectification and isolation of Gharial subjects, ideas of containment, and bearing ... More
Spring Sailors – Six Synecologies Aloft responds to both experiences in the city by installing six sets of paper sculptures inspired by Lahori kite designs in the Aiwan or grand hall at the Shalimar Gardens. The kites’ geometry and arrangement harmonize with the Gardens’ precise symmetries, while their sails flutter ... More
Abbas’s Aerial Studies are among the latest pieces the artist has realized in marble inlay, which she began to work with after her return to Lahore in 2015, engaging with local workshops and in the process developing a close familiarity with the stone’s variations across different parts of Pakistan and ... More
For as long as he can remember being an artist, Chong has been drawn to the presence of books, libraries, and writings in paintings. In Oleanders, the artist wandered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and captured one hundred six close-up images of paintings with books in ... More
Nabi & Rehman's collaborative project Mitti, Mazdoori, Mahaul is an ongoing dialogue with the ground and its realities in and around Lahore. It attends to materiality, memory, and practices to think about how soil counter-narrates the histories of improvement, and how the earth shapeshifts and resists demarcation — attaching and ... More
Promised Land is a three-channel interactive video game project that unfolds the narrative of the European history of colonialism by addressing the notion of land and landscape and how it is expropriated, exploited, and romanticized in both digital and material worlds. The work is a kind of film in which ... More
Water Bodies, an ensemble of high-key blue and orange works made especially for Of Mountains and Seas, responds to the particular hydrology of Lahore, which generally schedules water delivery to residents only at certain times of day, making backup water tanks a necessary part of everyday life. Taking some of ... More
Tamboo in Urdu and Kejdaj in Pashtun are the same name for the mobile tents used by the nomadic pastoralists in Pakistan, such as the Gujjar, Pashtun and Baloch, the Rohi and Rebari communities, used to shelter during their months-long transhumant routes with their animals connecting the low lands with ... More
In her first time exhibiting in Pakistan, Tee combines collages made with dried tulip petals and pineapple cloth textile coverings to uncover the fragile entanglements of life in the Anthropocene. The subject of the migration journey takes on autobiographical and historical meaning for Tee and the material she employs. Her ... More
Lost Shadows is a video recording of a shadow puppetry performance that tells the story of an agrarian village whose life was irrevocably altered by the advent of industrial agriculture. Though it has freed traditional crop farmers from the seasonal famine (Monga), the introduction of industrial hybrid crops in the ... More
Still Life is a larger-than-life charcoal drawing on Wasli paper of the region’s native inhabitant, the sea buckthorn shrub, a resilient plant known for its medicinal properties and for its vital role in preventing soil erosion. Moreover, this shrub used to be the home and source of food for different ... More
The result of a three-yearthree year research project, Köken Ergun’s latest film is a collaboration with Indonesian animation artist Fetra Danu. “Invest in Indonesia / Make sure that you don’t miss it!” goes the refrain of a song featured in China, Beijing, I Love You!!. The film is an animation ... More
New’s Mebuyan installations grow out of the native Mindanawon’s abiding interest in indigenous Filipino mythology, fantasy, and science, mixed with a dash of old-fashioned stagecraft. First realized for Burning Man and at Art in the Park in Makati, the Philippines, in 2021, each incarnation re-imagines Mebuyan, the Bagobo goddess of ... More
For the Lahore Biennale, Abuzar continues his ongoing engagement with the River Ravi. Working on an individual and collective basis (with the Ravi Bachao Tehreek) over the last few years, the artist draws attention to the stresses and pollution suffered by the fragile body of water that over the centuries ... More
Jaarsma has created a new work commissioned for LB03 from her Blanket Talks series, a mixed-mediamixed media installation platform for discursive performances. The artist designed and created 8 different woodblock stamps produced in Lahore and Yogyakarta. She then stamped and printed on diverse material substrates found locally in Indonesia and ... More
The practice of Hong Kong-based Natalie Lo Lai Lai as artist and as part of the organic farming community Sangwoodgoon is rooted in care for the local environment. Since being founded over a decade ago, the collective has been engaged in working with the land and community at their farm ... More
Nigar’s contribution to LB03 dives deep into the extractive practice of mining and its lasting impact on people and the environment. Into the Earth is a mixed-media installation that draws on the artist’s teenage experience working in the coal mines in his hometown. On the wall, a video immerses viewers ... More
Nilofar Akmut’s “Plus One, Minus One,” a commission for LB03, emerges from thinking about climate change, printmaking, and embroidery, in collaboration with partners in London, Lahore, and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Fusing a non-linear performative narrative and experimental film, the artist references satellite images from the European Space Agency that shows ... More
Nurjahan Akhlaq’s understated works on paper, referencing Japanese court imagery and modernist painters such as Francis Bacon, make use of the collage technique of making use of found and existing imagery materials. But the artist does collage one better. For Lasting Impressions, she used a blank but prepared sheet of ... More
For the artist’s first time exhibiting in Pakistan, Suwannakudt presents The Bamboo Tales, a mixed-mediamixed media installation where a group of bamboo rods are vertically suspended above a reflective surface surrounded by dark soil. The bamboo rods are inscribed with the names of plants grown in the artist’s backyard in ... More
In Shenakhti Card Nahi (not an ID card), Jaan questions the seemingly universal rights of citizenship by blurring the ID card beyond legibility, thus brutally erasing the holder’s identity. By further replacing the ubiquitous phrase "If you find the missing card, put it in the nearest letterbox" to "on finding ... More
Agarwal’s I am Going to the Sea, Clear the Path is a photographic and sound installation that spotlights the evolutionary history of endangered Indus and Ganges River dolphins, which reaches back over twenty-five million years, when the shallow Tethys Sea still covered the region, and before the collision of the ... More
The selection of ceramic pieces from private collections presents a glimpse into the output of Salahuddin Mian, NCA’s first graduate in the medium and widely acknowledged as Pakistan’s first ceramic artist. As his nephew Ahmed Mian recollected, “His deep level of conscientiousness can be summed up in one powerful example: ... More
Stains of Oxus evokes an oneiric journey through the greatest Central Asian River, Amu Darya – known from Greek times as Oxus, portraying the transformation of landscape and witnessing people who inhabit its riverbanks. The film starts at the birth of the river on the high plateau of Tajikistan and ... More
One of Pakistan’s earliest and most distinguished ceramic artists, Alam brought the world to Lahore through her exploration of different traditions of working with clay. Among them was the deep history of the Indus Valley itself: Alam traced her own practice to Muhammad Nawaz, the kumhar master potter of Harappan ... More
Stolon Press’s Hustle Culture is a record made of the daily life around three bird baths placed under a chaste tree and a tamarind tree, in a small garden, in a small town in Malaysia. The visitors to the baths vary—sunbirds, fantails, swallows, an occasional tailorbird, maybe even a kingfisher ... More
Screening at Alhamra Hall 3, 10 AM-6 PM; The Fortress presents, then slowly takes apart, supposedly archetypal “Man,” the universal Enlightenment subject that justified Western colonialism, and continues to justify the exploitation of natural resources. As first encountered at Alfalah Theatre, the subject, as embodied by the character Wai King, ... More
Bauhinia Purpurea is a series of sculptures that Sopheap Pich began in 2022. Like the morning glory, a flowering weed that also helped nourish many Cambodians through the Khmer Rouge regime, and which Pich commemorated in a series of sculptures begun in 2011, the bauhinia purpurea is both pleasing to ... More
The title of the work Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous borrows from a verbal inflection that specifies time of action or state where ‘Tayem’ is future and ‘Ladhamba’ is continuous in the artist’s native language. Filmed in the Himalayas, the film follows a conversation between two indigenous figures from different ... More
Frequenting and navigating the mangrove waterways on his boat, Qaiser’s obsession with this unique marine ecosystem turns into a photographic practice of archiving its beauty and human-caused degradation. Witnessing big age-old mangrove trees being cut down and shredded into pieces, and the slow death of its expansive root system and ... More
Museo Aero Solar is a project begun in 2007 that sounds the alarm about the proliferation of plastic bags by reclaiming them for community and art. In the case of Lahore Biennale 03, the professors, students, and staff from the Department of Fine Arts at Kinnaird College for Women worked ... More
In Earth to Earth, Yeung conceives of specially commissioned site-specific installations that draw attention to the resources needed to give shape to the things we take for granted. Earth to Earth consists of two sets of four unfired terracotta wares whose clay has been exposed to the monsoon rains. Without ... More
Koreri Projection is a mixed media installation consisting of found objects, mural-size paintings on canvas and bark and hanging banners, through which a light projection from the ceiling illuminates. It is Udeido Collective’s intention that Koreri, meaning "a new life / a life full of peace" in the Papuan ... More
Usman Saeed’s Bagh-e Noor Jahan (The Garden of Noor Jahan)—named after the powerful Mughal Empress Noor Jahan (1577–1645), queen consort of Emperor Jahangir—is a series of trifold, open-access community gardens that combine early 17th-century Mughal horticultural practices with present-day migrant botanical specimens. It spans three large green areas between Nila ... More
WeMend, initiated by Womanifesto, a women-led project based in Thailand, is an ongoing social workshop inviting visitors and community groups to engage in sewing, embroidery, patchwork, and fabric upcycling. The iteration of WeMend for LB03 has been developed by BNU-SVAD at the invitation of the Lahore Biennale Foundation.
Working with three local female directors and three local actors on three video edits, Wong Kit Yi’s karaoke lecture Embedded explores the relationship between fertility and social ecology in Pakistan and other parts of Asia that are already experiencing the direct effects of the climate crisis. Excessive heat negatively affects ... More
Akhlaq is best known for his paintings and works on paintings, which drew on modernism and Mughal miniature painting in equal measure, and which laid the ground for an influential trajectory of contemporary practice by subsequent artists. His melding of tradition and innovation can also be seen in his lesser-known ... More
Shelters for seeds and all that quietly survives is an invitation to sit with other-than-human worlds and multispecies landscapes to allow and practice forms of ecological witnessing. Taking the form and visual layout of the Southeast Asian mancala (the word mancala comes from the tripartite Arabic root n-q-l, which ... More
For Phoenix, Zheng Bo collaborated with seven Pakistani farmers living and working on a date palm farm outside Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to make a dance. The work celebrates the beauty of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) and the skill of these stewards, highlighting intimate relations cultivated over millennia, vital ... More
The audiovisual installation Eye (2015) taps into the vital role of the ‘eye’ in sensing the phenomenological world and witnessing all its changes and ruination. Referencing the cross-cultural symbolism of the omnipresent eye(s), ranging from the seven-eyed prophet Zechariah from the New Testament and the Quran, to the four-eyed ancient ... More